Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Charles Bernstein | Attack of the Difficult Poems / 2011

talking in circles

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bernstein Attack of the Difficult Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

 

"I'm not joking, and if I seem to talk in circles, it just seems that way."

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep as quoted in Charles Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems

 

I mentioned to my husband Howard the other morning that, except for conservatively close-minded, humorless poets and readers, I could not imagine anyone not enjoying and agreeing with Charles Bernstein in his wonderful new critical collection, Attack of the Difficult Poems. No matter what kind of poetry one reads or writes, readers will find  Bernstein's book as a call for multiplicities of approaches, rereadings, misreadings, poems entirely removed from the page or emphatically spilling over the page in alphabetic abandon. His methods are often humorous and, at times, even silly as he seeks out meaning—never a rote summary or simple answer. He enjoys discovering poets where one might never have looked, from the Black songs of early jazz singers, to the humorous Yiddish shitck of Fanny Brice and early lyrics by Irving Berlin, from the recreated Scots of Hugh MacDairmid to the Broadway songs of Cole Porter and Oscar Hammerstein II.


     That is not to say that Bernstein has no prejudices, that he posits no values behind the diversity of poetic approaches he discusses; it's simply that his way of argument is inclusive rather than confrontational. As the author himself writes in the addendum to his essay, "Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?"

 

                 I am as partial and partisan as anyone. Preference and selection are

                 a necessary part of aesthetic judgment. Yet, my radar might be the

                 exact map of another person's exclusions, just as another's exclusions

                 might be a map to my paradise. The relation of these two ideas

                 (conviction in one's aesthetic judgment and its inevitable limitations)

                 is not irreconcilable but dialectical.

 

For Bernstein, the dialogical approach is everything. Disagree with me, and we have something to talk about, Bernstein repeats time and again throughout these pages. In short, he is a nice guy who believes in poetry with the devotion of a devout rabbi or priest.

     But then, I forget that Bernstein has often shaken up institutional organizations and angered noted individuals in and outside the poetry communities. As Marjorie Perloff begins a short conversation with the poet, published in this book,


"Charles, almost twenty years have gone by since that fateful MLA [Modern Language Association meeting] when you delivered the lecture "The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA" (1983). I still remember what a tempest you caused and how furious the old timers like M. L. Rosenthal were at your demolition job. You were, in those days, a great fighter against "official verse culture."

 

     I myself recall a dinner party where I had invited several poets of what might be described as the "second generation" of the New York School, furiously chastising me for my publishing of Charles' work, and proclaiming, as Bernstein himself discusses in Attack of the Difficult Poems, that he was a theorist instead of a poet. "Apparently poets can't talk and tie their shoes at the same time," as Bernstein might quip.

     But it is still difficult for me to comprehend why anyone in love with poetry would not want to embrace a work that so humorously and passionately offers ways for readers to enter the texts and speaks for the importance of poetic endeavor.

     Bernstein's work sets itself up in the first essay, "The Difficult Poem," as deflating the fears readers may have approaching a work that appears to have a vocabulary and syntax that is difficult to understand or that makes one feel "inadequate or stupid," in short, a poem that requires a struggle to appreciate and find meaning. Like a friendly dentist, Bernstein—employing the comic gestures of a science fiction film—reassures readers that the "problem" is not theirs alone, and requires just a little painless effort to turn the reading experience into a joyful discovery.

     Soon, however, things quickly turn more serious, as Bernstein seeks ways to help students everywhere deal with poetry. In "A Blow Is Like an Instrument: The Poetic Imaginary and Curricular Practices," the author takes the reader through his own experiences in the classroom as he proffers a "radically democratic" approach to teaching, encouraging students to read diverse works that raise more questions than answers. For Bernstein this begins at the door of the university or college, where he makes a plea for "enriched content, especially aesthetic and conceptual content, over a streamlined vocational goal orientation."

     Along the way, Bernstein takes on issues of university tenure (he thoroughly supports it as a way to protect the whole thinking-questioning process), academic standards, and numerous other issues. A short quote will have summarize Bernstein's intelligent criticisms of current academic values:

 

                And what of academic standards? Aren't these the dikes that protect us

                from the flood of unregulated thought? Or are they like the narrow Chinese

                shoe that deforms our thinking to fit its image of rigor? When I examine

                the formats and implied standards for peer-reviewed journals and academic

                conferences, they suggest to me a preference for a lifeless prose, bloated

                with the compulsory repetitive explanation of what every other "important"

                piece on the subject has said. Of course, many professors will insist that they

                do not subscribe to this, but the point is not what any one of us does, but

                the institutional culture we accept.

 

That these clear-minded queries about college and university policies come from a professor who has published in nearly all the major academic journals, as well as in hundreds of smaller literary publications, speaks volumes, and helps to convince us of his protests.

     Throughout Attack of the Difficult Poems, moreover, Bernstein gives specific examples, not only of how to structure a program that will better allow students to think and question poetic art, but specific classroom tactics to encourage their explorations. I suggest that any young (older too) teacher of poetry might find Bernstein's suggestions useful for the classroom, and helpful in showing how to approach texts that may at first seem beyond the students' grasp (although it is, just as often, the other way around, I am afraid).

     Bernstein goes much further, discussing the whole history of language and poetry, comparing, for example, the early use of the written poem in Homer's day (when it served less as a finished text than a reminder of the oral performance) to the current alphabetic text that is a thing in itself.

Along the way, in various essays, the author considers the effects of the computer and digitalization of poetry (many aspects of which he refreshingly embraces), and in a brilliant discussion of "Making Audio Visible," helps readers to understand the importance of hearing poetry (read by the poet or a performer; Bernstein argues for the value of numerous hearings) to help in the experience of a work. His and his students' creation of PENNSOUND, a large audio archive available on line, has been, perhaps, one of the most important acts in preserving poetry as an oral force in our time.

     My favorite essay in the book is "Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics," in which Bernstein considers a wide range of poetic voices from Zukofsky and other Objectivists to American folk music and popular Black lyricists such as poet James Weldon Johnson. His inquiring mind takes us from Oscar Hammerstein's II lyrics for "Ol Man River” to the altered lyrics in the performances of singer, political activist Paul Robeson. By the end of the essay, I found myself spending hours in tracking down various online recordings and performances, as well as rereading song lyrics (I had already published a volume of American song lyrics of the 19th Century) of this period, all of which I found fascinating and illuminating in comprehending the more "difficult" works of Zukofsky, Oppen, Eliot, and others.

     In later essays in the book, Bernstein explores poetry's relationship with art and forms of poetry that are as much at home in the art gallery or museum as in a poetry anthology. His brilliant analysis of poetic frauds played out in presses and poetic publications by figures such as Alan Sokal, Max Harris, Yasusada (Kent Johnson), and others, is filled with the tension between the desire to satirize or mock social and political poetic strictures and the failure to live up to the sacred trust of the reader, publisher and author, to say nothing of the larger community.

     Along the way are other mischievous and funny inventions that pepper the more erudite conversations, and, just as Bernstein has promised, sweep up the reader (at least this reader) into the arms of poetic euphoria.

     The author ends this phantasmagoria with a very funny, but also somewhat frightening, satire of a Galileo-like recanting for all the ideas he has promulgated throughout. As the recantings of Bernstein's "Recantorium," build up in pace and absurdity, the recantings themselves grow into recants, so that by work's end no one can possibly determine whether the poet is recanting his own ideas or his recanting of his ideas, or, possibly, his recanting of the recants ("And for this I recant my cant, cant and recant."). But there is a dangerous double sword to this silly performance that seems to suggest that the reader still may hold with the nonsensical viewpoints that the author is now purportedly embracing. And if that is so...well then Bernstein's brilliant arguments have had no effect, a possibility that at least this reader simply cannot imagine.

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2011

Reprinted in Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2011).    

Arnold Wesker | Roots / 1959

work, eat, and die

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arnold Wesker Roots (London: Bloomsbury, 1959, 2001)

 

Arnold Wesker’s 1958 kitchen-sink drama Roots (the second part of his early trilogy) has not aged well. Its apostrophe-filled Norfolk dialect, stuffed with “yit”s, “git”s, and “blust”s, makes me think of Henry Higgins’ line in My Fair Lady, “Whenever an Englishman speaks he makes some other Englishman despise him.” And the characters spend most of their time on stage—when the central figure Beatie is not spouting the words of her London boyfriend, Ronnie—peeling potatoes, cutting up runner beans, and frying up liver. In short, the play demonstrates the family’s lack of “roots” by refusing to dig any deeper than gossiping about the neighbors (including a pub owner who is accused of “accosting” another man) and complaining of a “pain in the guts.”

 


      When Beatie (the wonderful Joan Plowright in the original production) returns home to Norfolk for a short vacation, she is appalled by their refusal to even think. And while waiting for Ronnie to arrive and meet them, she grows increasing embarrassed for their stubborn stupidity. Yet, she herself admits she does not quite understand those in Ronnie’s crowd, and still does not comprehend how to ask questions when she doesn’t know what is being said. Ronnie describes words as being like “bridges,” as paths between human beings, and Beatie clearly is intrigued by the idea. But having grown up in a world where, as her mother puts it, “Words never mean anything,” Beatie is clearly out of her element in London.

       Yet her mind has been opened, and seeing her sister and her husband, her mother and father, and various neighbors once more, she finds herself dissatisfied with their lives and, most importantly, with herself. And in her recreation of Ronnie for her family, even her mother vaguely recognizes “you do bring a little life with you anyway.”

        Unfortunately, it’s a quoted line, a life she cannot yet herself experience. It’s clear that Ronnie has begun to influence her, but the words she repeats are something alien to both her and her family, as she were speaking another language.

        During her visit, a beloved neighbor dies and her father loses most of his income as he is demoted on the farm on which he works to “casual labour.” Equally irritating to Beatie, particularly since Ronnie is an active socialist, is the fact that her family simply accepts these facts—men working themselves to death and having most of their income taken away by the powers that be—without any protest and even serious commentary. 

     Yet gradually we discover that the renowned Ronnie and his friends, in some respects, are not that different from her own family. At one point she lets out the fact that Ronnie and his friends have all failed their exams and work at hard labor not so very different from her own father and brother-in-law. And while her family has gathered to await her boyfriend’s arrival, a letter is delivered that honestly accesses the truth:

 

                  My dear Beatie. It wouldn’t really work would it? My

                  ideas about handing on a new kind of life are quite

                  useless and romantic if I’m really honest. If I were a

                  healthy human being it might have been all right but

                  most of us intellectuals are pretty sick and neurotic—

                  as you have often observed—and we couldn’t build

                  a world even if we were given the reins of government—

                  not yet any rate. I don’t blame you for being stubborn,

                  I don’t blame you for ignoring every suggestion I ever

                  made—I only blame myself for encouraging you to

                  believe we could make a go of it and now two weeks

                  of your not being here has given me the cowardly chance

                  to think about it and decide and I—

 

     It takes the shock of their breakup to suddenly make Beatie see that she has behaved no differently from her family. That Ronnie has attempted to teach her to type, to add figures into her painting, or even to read a book, she has, as she puts it “taken no heed.”  Admittedly, she “never discussed things”: “I never knew patience.”


     But to her own surprise, she now becomes angry, turning on her mother, demanding some words of comfort, to which her mother, in her continued stubbornness, denies her: “I can’t help you my gal, no that I can’t, and you get used to that once and for all.”

     And with those words Beatie perceives their problem. Despite their ties with the land, they have never realized that they too, as human beings, needed deep roots, something to “push up from” in order to change things, to make life better.

     It’s the passivity of their lives that makes their living so meaningless, and leaves them powerless. But in the very perception of these facts and her speaking of it to her family, she has, quite miraculously, come alive, has actually begun to think for herself. Yet, as Wesker makes clear, there can be no changing for them, and he ends the play by having her standing alone, perhaps stronger and more perceptive now that even Ronnie, as the others rush to the table to eat.

       We cannot know what will happen to her, but surely she will no longer be able to bear Norfolk, and certainly she will now put down roots somewhere, hoping to pass them on to another generation.

       In the end, however, Beatie’s perception—and the author’s revelation—is such a modest one that it seems almost insignificant, as if Wesker has put all his energies into expressing a simple cliché: we must learn to communicate with one another, a variation of the lament “can’t we all get on together?”

      The class tensions implied by this play must have seemed more shocking and dynamic when it was first presented, yet today the issues seem tame and vague. And the realism that may have enchanted so many viewers when this play was so well-received in British theaters is today as pale as a David Belasco production. Realism, it is clear, isn’t reality, and reality just ain’t what it used to be.

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2016).

 

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